In 2020, my sister had a baby. Not just any baby, the cutest baby ever. I’m not over-exaggerating. I’m sure your babies are all cute, don’t get me wrong. But this kid, she’s too much. She’s just a beautiful bundle of gorgeous squishiness that has been a ray of glorious sunshine in the dull grey shittiness of 2020.
She has no idea of the year that she was born in. She has literally no clue. How crazy it is that someone would exist in 2020 and not know of the absurdity of the world around her.
My sister had waited until the ‘perfect time’ to have a child. She had finished her degree, started a career she loved, travelled, married a nice man with whom to sire an offspring and with him bought a nice family-raising three bedroom house near the sea. It was the perfect time.
Sadly, 2020 gave zero fucks about the timing she had so cautiously planned into her life.
Instead, at 25 weeks she was forced to leave the school she taught in and work from home and told she would be ‘shielding’. She attended growth scans and midwife appointments on her own while her husband sat in the car. Her nieces, my daughters, never got to cuddle her growing bump and feel their little cousin kicking away. Her pregnancy was spent alone, her maternity leave took the shape of weeks sat in her empty house. And when her baby girl finally did arrive, she would spend her first year seeing humans behind face masks: imagining that outside of her house lived only humans with half face, half coloured fabric.
I’m assuming that by the time my niece is old enough to understand it all, Covid-19 will be a swear word that we refer to as ‘he who has shall not be named’. I’m assuming that by the time she can talk we will no longer be wearing masks to buy bog roll, and will be allowed to stand within less than two metres of others. I say assuming, I’m hoping that’s the case.
And so, she may never know. She may never know how some of us, the few who were lucky enough to meet her in person, met her wearing masks and dousing ourselves in alcohol gel. She will never know that her Mum attended baby groups on zoom, and bought all of her belongings online. She’ll never be aware that her mother googled whether babies should be wearing tiny masks to protect them when they’re out and about. She may never be aware that most of her family were a good two stone heavier than they had been because they had done little for months than sit on their arses watching Tiger King.
And perhaps she may never know how important her arrival was. How she, and other babies born in 2020, were the little chunk of joy we needed in a year of misery and sadness. That they were the good news story in a year of bad news stories.
I said something to her a few weeks ago. She smiled and did a particularly loud fart: which I’m taking to mean she understand and appreciated what I was saying. And I’m saying it now to her and to every 2020 baby, you beautiful, clueless little idiots….. I’m sorry that the world isn’t a little bit more wonderful for you. But thank you. Thank you for making the world a little bit more wonderful for us.
The Ridiculous Mrs H 